VI
He will come urgent as a food riot. Beware the man who sheds tears of mercury. His cough alone will thin out the ozone. He grips oceans with the black fingers of trawlers. His voice is a slow leakage in the Third World Night. Beware the Waste-Broker. He comes to paint your wellsprings ivory black and chrome yellow. You will know him by his industrial oath: $40 a drum! yes, only $40 a drum! Senegal, Nigeria, West Africa, the sun dangerous as a forty-gallon drum. Drums stacked on rotting pallets in the back yard of tropical forests. Drums swollen like the bellies of starved children with toxic waste.
The Berlin Wall is falling down, each chunk a souvenir sponsored by Smirnoff. Who was that poet who whispered, Death is a maestro from Germany. Away in America, Raymond Carver, as the provinces of his body revolted, gasped our daily losses from ruined lungs. It comes down to love, he said. What we hear is anger in its orbit.
Falling piano notes. The last of the rain down brickwork. Guttering full. Something like sounds of water hitting a serving dish. A couple of taps. Its that hour. A train, of course, fading in and out of suburbs. Time running off everywhere. George Moore shuts his green door against the catholic glare of Ireland. A sense of things erased. The whole night sliding down. Lamplight. Gumleaves as strips of plastic bright through a casual breeze. What can later researchers make of this, the Age of Rapidity? Things made which had small use then cast aside. The mirage of modern love. Something swapped for something else. Made better. And that charge of energy varicose-veined as lightning, a little kindness left to hover, unquestioned? We know it as we get older.